The paramilitary movement, whose loyalists are prime suspects in last week’s Oklahoma City bombing, is widely believed to have links to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
With more than 10,000 members believed to be active in 13 to 20 states, many of these militias borrow their anti-government ideology from anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“Their view of government is really a rewrite of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” said Kenneth Stern, referring to the notorious anti-Semitic tract.
“Anti-Semitism is recast as anti-governmentalism,” said Stern, an American Jewish Committee program specialist who recently wrote a report on the militia movement.
The assessment of the militia movement comes in the wake of the April 19 car bombing in front of the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the worst terrorist attack against U.S. citizens on American soil.
The attack renewed calls for swift legislation to combat both international and domestic terrorism.
As the death toll mounted daily, recuers combed through the wreckage and a rapidly developing investigation shifted its focus from suspicions of a Muslim fundamentalist attack to domestic terrorism.
Officials have charged at least one suspect, Timothy McVeigh, with the bombing. Terry and James Nichols, who are brothers and friends of McVeigh, were also being questioned in connection with the attack.
All there men have been linked to paramilitary groups.
The loosely connected militia movement breeds heavily armed foot soldiers prepared to fight against the federal government, according to those who have studies the phenomenon.
The groups believe that the government has violated their liberties through laws on taxation, gun control and home schooling. They also think that U.S. cooperation with international bodies such as the United Nations threatens American sovereignty.
“The aims of these militias, often bellicosely stated, involve laying the groundwork for massive resistance to the federal government and its law enforcement agencies as well as opposition to gun control laws,” according to a report issued last year by the Anti-Defamation League.
Although the groups’ stated target is the U.S. government, many of the leaders have allied themselves with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, including the Aryan Nation and the Ku Klux Klan, according to both ADL and AJCommittee.
“The movers and shakers and people doing the organizing have a real pedigree of racism and hate,” Stern said. “But they are not organizing to go out and do what the skinheads do,” specifically targeting blacks, Jews and foreigners.
In their literature, the militias talk about an international conspiracy to take over America using code words such as “international bankers,” which is still used in anti-Semitic quarters to describe a plot by Jews to take over the world.
Jews are seen by many of the leaders of this movement “as the evil force behind government,” Stern wrote in the AJCommittee report, issued just nine days before the Oklahoma attack.
“It is not unreasonable to surmise that this blend of anti-Semitic and anti- government paranoia and guns will result in tragedy,” Stern wrote with a certain prescience.
On the day of the attack, even before any arrests, Stern noted the April 19 anniversary of the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, and said in a statement, “Although it is too early to tell, this bombing may be connected to the growing militia movement around the country.”
Thomas Halpern of the ADL called the militias a “new generation of extremism.”
Nonetheless, Halpern, the co-author of the ADL report, “Armed and Dangerous: Militias Take Aim at the Federal Government,” said it is hostility to the government that drives the movement, not anti-Semitism.
But there are links, he said, citing as an example an Aryan Nation gathering in the early 1990s at which the founder of the Militia of Montana, John Trochmann, spoke.
At the same time, however, some militias have gone out of their way to distance themselves from anti-Semitism and racism, Halpern said, “partly because they regard anti-Semitism and racism as a loser.”
Some of these groups believe anti-Semitism and racism “will drive more people than it will attract.”
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma attack has prompted renewed calls from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to pass the administration’s Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act.
Although initially aimed at combatting Middle Eastern terrorism, the proposed legislation could now take on additional components targeted at domestic terrorism.
In the wake of Oklahoma bombing, President Clinton and members of Congress have pledged to give law enforcement agencies more power to monitor militia groups operating in the United States.
In the past, many law enforcement agencies took a “hand off approach” to the militias, ADL’s Halpern said, predicting closer scrutiny of these groups in the future.
The bombing has highlighted concerns that law enforcement agencies at times have to wait too long to investigate groups suspected of terrorist activity.
As part of his new campaign, Clinton will ask Congress to pass legislation that would establish a Domestic Counterterrorism Center to be headed by the FBI and also to create a fund to infiltrate suspected terrorist groups.
The proposal would also increase FBI access to hotel and motel registers, phone logs and credit card records.
Congress began considering the administration’s anti-terrorism legislation three weeks ago.
The bill, in its original form, would ban fund raising by terrorist organizations, declare terrorist acts a federal offense and allow for expedited deportations of suspected terrorists.
In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-III.) said he would try to strengthen the bill when the House returns from its recess May 1.
In the senate, which reconvened this week, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, planned to shift the focus of his hearings on the legislation Thursday from international to domestic terrorism, Capitol Hill staffers said.
The legislation, even before Oklahoma, has been a centerpiece of the organized Jewish community’s legislative agenda.
Last week’s attack has only reinforced the resolve among Jewish groups to press for passage of the bill.
Arab Americans, however, have cautioned against using the bombing in Oklahoma to rush any legislation through Congress.
Even prior to the Oklahoma bombing, some Arab Americans and other had expressed concern that such legislation would violate civil liberties.
In any case, Congress has now put counterterrorism on the fast track.
Activists on both sides of the issue expect committee votes to begin in the coming weeks.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
